Posted at 10:00am on Monday, November 13th, 2006 by Andy
Not that Andrew Orlowski has any respect for bloggers and thus is unlikely to feel unduly stung by this post, but here’s another example of The Register’s strange strange attitude to Open Source from today’s piece on OSS vs Novell:
Whatever you may say about them (and they rarely produce a piece of software usable by someone not already suffering from Asperger’s) free software developers draw a quality benchmark for what’s permissible for others to code and share.
I mean really. It’s not big, clever or necessary.
Posted at 6:45pm on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 by Andy
I have to admit to not having heard anything about this story until now, when it appears to have already run its course. Still, it’s a fascinating (if very flawed) argument that Wallace puts forward…
Essentially, by giving software away, they have stifled competition by creating an environment where small developers can’t compete with Linux’s price-point. The GPL functions as the conspiracy in this strange world, since it is a common effort to pull the price-rug out from under any potential competitors.
As an aside, I do wish El Reg would stop sniping at OSS… Comments like “And even though these new products might be clunky, difficult to use and inaccessible to all but the geekiest of geeks, such a cooperative is not illegal” are painfully indicative of the paper’s opinion of OSS; perhaps they have forgotten that (among other things) the Apache and PHP that drive their website is Open Source?
